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IRON HANS
Take a lunatic
for instance,
with Saint Averton, the patron saint,
a lunatic wearing that strait jacket
like a sleeveless sweater,
singing to the wall like Muzak,
how he walks east to west,
west to east again
like a fish in an aquarium.
And if they stripped him bare
he would fasten his hands around your throat.
After that he would take your corpse
and deposit his sperm in three orifices.
You know, I know,
you’d run away.
I am mother of the insane.
Let me give you my children:
Take a girl sitting in a chair
like a china doll.
She doesn’t say a word.
She doesn’t even twitch.
She’s as still as furniture.
And you’ll move off.
Take a man who is crying
over and over,
his face like a sponge.
You’ll move off.
Take a woman talking,
purging herself with rhymes,
drumming words out like a typewriter,
planting words in you like grass seed.
You’ll move off.
Take a man full of suspicions
saying: Don’t touch this,
you’ll be electrocuted.
Wipe off this glass three times.
There is arsenic in it.
I hear messages from God
through the fillings in my teeth.
Take a boy on a bridge.
One hundred feet up. About to jump,
thinking: This is my last ball game.
This time it’s a home run.
Wanting the good crack of the bat.
Wanting to throw his body away
like a corn cob.
And you’ll move off.
Take an old lady in a cafeteria
staring at the meat loaf,
crying: Mama! Mama!
And you’ll move off.
Take a man in a cage
wetting his pants,
beating on that crib,
breaking his iron hands in two.
And you’ll move off.
Clifford, Vincent, Friedrich,
my scooter boys,
deep in books,
long before you were mad.
Zelda, Hannah, Renée.
Moon girls,
where did you go?
There once was a king
whose forest was bewitched.
All the huntsmen,
all the hounds,
disappeared in it like soap bubbles.
A brave huntsman and his dog
entered one day to test it.
The dog drank from a black brook;
as he lapped an arm reached out
and pulled him under.
The huntsman emptied the pool
pail by pail by pail
and at the bottom lay
a wild man,
his body rusty brown.
His hair covering his knees.
Perhaps he was no more dangerous
than a hummingbird;
perhaps he was Christ’s boy-child;
perhaps he was only bruised like an apple
but he appeared to them to be a lunatic.
The king placed him in a large iron cage
in the courtyard of his palace.
The court gathered around the wild man
and munched peanuts and sold balloons
and not until he cried out:
Agony! Agony!
did they move off.
The king’s son
was playing with his ball one day
and it rolled into the iron cage.
It appeared as suddenly as a gallstone.
The wild man did not complain.
He talked calmly to the boy
and convinced him to unlock the cage.
The wild man carried him and his ball
piggyback off into the woods
promising him good luck and gold for life.
The wild man set the boy at a golden spring
and asked him to guard it from a fox
or a feather that might pollute it.
The boy agreed and took up residence there.
The first night he dipped his finger in.
It turned to gold; as gold as a fountain pen,
but the wild man forgave him.
The second night he bent to take a drink
and his hair got wet, turning as gold
as Midas’ daughter.
As stiff as the Medusa hair of a Greek statue.
This time the wild man could not forgive him.
He sent the boy out into the world.
But if you have great need, he said,
you may come into the forest and call Iron Hans
and I will come to help you for you
were the only one who was kind
to this accursed bull of a wild ...
